Friday, October 26, 2012

Buses are positively ubiquitous in Israel. I've written about them lots of times before, including here and here and here and here and here.

And I want to do it again.

We're in choref zman, winter time, in Israel. Not literally as in snow and ice, because the weather is still relatively mild here, but in terms of the clock, which we set back already, a few days before Yom Kippur.

It took two buses and nearly 90 minutes to get there. It's funny how my relationship to travel time has become more elastic in Israel. In 90 minutes from Baltimore, I could be halfway to Newark airport. Last night, I traveled less than 15 miles.

I especially love riding buses after dark.

It was pure, tear-inducing joy, spending those 90 minutes driving through Jerusalem on a Thursday night, listening to oldies on my "Nostalgia" playlist. Through the bus windows, I got to see:

Har Habayit (every time I travel into Jerusalem)

Tourists and locals shopping for tomatoes and burekas at Machane Yehuda

Arab men in keffiyeh (keffiyot? keffiyim? keffiyahs?)

Felafel vendors

Small crowds of shoppers, laden with packages, waiting at covered stops for other buses

High end tourist shops selling expensive Judaica

Small, old holes-in-the-wall from which specialty vendors have been making a living for decades

Lots of Hebrew signs which hurt my brain trying to read

But more than that, the ride was filled with a special kind of I can't believe I get to live in Israel bliss, watching the endless parade of humanity, my peeps, boarding and alighting, as I traveled to my destination:

No, not this kind of peeps.

The fine-looking soldier in uniform, asleep on his huge backpack, traveling home for Shabbat.

The modestly-dressed religious woman in sparkly black clothes, full makeup and blond sheitel in an updo, on her way to a simcha.

Three 14 year-old Israeli girls in the seats that face one other near the front, babbling and giggling in rapid fire Hebrew.

The old man with celery sticking out of his covered bubbe cart.

The young woman in a tank top with a whole lot of eye liner, saying Tehillim.

The young man in a black hat doing his best to learn from a Hebrew sefer in the low light available inside the bus.

The middle-aged Russian couple dressed for a nice dinner out.

The striking, slender Ethiopian woman who stood talking on her cell phone the whole ride, even though there were plenty of seats available.

Monday, October 22, 2012

The Moon’s Lost Light: A Torah Perspective on Women from
the Fall of Eve to the Full Redemption
by Devorah Heshelis
Targum Press, 2006
134 pages, including 192 footnotes and 3 appendices
Currently out-of-print but available as an ebook.

There is no
way to whitewash this fact: in the beginning of my Jewish journey, there was much
pain and many tears over my experience as a newly religious woman in a
traditional Jewish community.I was perpetually
torn in two. On the one hand, I was learning
and loving Torah.I was simultaneously fighting
to retain my dignity as a woman in a community that appeared to thrive on
silencing and sidelining me.At the
time, I had no role models, no decent books and no one who took my concerns
seriously.

Eventually, I
began to find books that addressed my issues. My personal struggle coincided
with an explosion of publishing about Jewish women and, over a period of years,
I amassed a collection of approximately 500 books about Jewish women. More than 20 years later, now married to an
Orthodox rabbi and living in a religious community in Israel, I am
ceaselessly fascinated by gender issues in Judaism.

Many of the books about women and Judaism made aliyah with me.

After much
study, I came to understand gender as a central organizing principle that permeates traditional Jewish thought. Apologetics
aside, I came to understand that traditional Judaism is, in fact, overly
masculine. And I began to suspect that the dawning of the Messianic era would correct
the imbalance and make women’s spirituality more central.

In 2006,
Devorah Heshelis, using a pen name, wrote a book that not only confirmed my
intuitive conclusions, but gave me access to 192 footnotes of Torah-true
sources to support them.

The core of The
Moon’s Lost Light is an extended essay in which Mrs. Heshelis recounts the
high spiritual level on which women were initially created and how women lost part
of our original spiritual glory through Chava’s sin. Mrs. Heshelis makes the
case, deeply rooted in Torah sources, that the enormous consequences of Chava’s
sin, which are elucidated in the book, have affected gender relations
throughout human history.In a sense,
all of human history to date has been a spiritual rectification of these
consequences.

In the end, Mrs.
Heshelis assures us of the Torah’s promise that gender equity and the balance
between masculine and feminine spiritual energy will ultimately be restored. Today, we plainly see progress in the
rectification of the spiritual status of women, but we do not yet see its
conclusion.

Of the
hundreds of books I have read about the status of women in Judaism, none has
impacted me as deeply as The Moon’s Lost Light. I carry the premise, and
the promise, of this magnificent scholarship with me every single day in my
life as a Jewish woman.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

I've just returned from my third trip back to the US in the 2+ years since we made aliyah. This was a trip I especially did not want to make. My mother-in-law, hospitalized for three weeks with multiple symptoms that defied diagnosis, passed away on the first day of Sukkot, just two days short of her 83rd birthday.

My in-laws were blessed with 70 happy years together.

Had she passed away less than a day before, shiva would have lasted an hour and the balance of the week-long mourning period would have been cancelled by Sukkot. As it happened, shiva was postponed until the entire holiday had passed, including the 8th day that is observed outside of Israel. So the family languished in a kind of mourning limbo for over a week, grieving privately without the communal support of shiva and its attendant mourning rituals.

Since one of my spiritual goals for the new year is to focus on the positive, even in a difficult situation, I recognized many brachot.

Once shiva began, there was a steady stream of visitors, most strangers
to me, but all with a connection to my husband or one or more members of his
family, most of whom have lived in the same area for close to
50 years.

I witnessed incredible chesed pour forth from this community. Spending so much time together, I discovered strengths in members of my husband's family that I hadn't fully appreciated in the past. And I was able to visit briefly with our daughter, my mother and my sister, along with her son and his new wife, all of whom came from other US cities to extend their condolences in person.

The visit was stuffed with difficult emotions. During my two weeks away, I felt bereft of Jerusalem. I didn't just
miss home. I missed God's Presence, which I find harder to sense outside of Israel. I missed the company of people who share my
worldview, the companionship of people who understand the sacrifices we (willingly) make to live where we understand that God has asked us to live.

It's common to hear talk about the financial sacrifices that life in Israel often requires. But today, at this stage of Jewish history, when aliyah often means living far from loved ones, my vote for the most difficult sacrifice of aliyah is the pain of saying goodbye to the people we love.

It's a pain that comes with death, but not only with death. It comes when we board our aliyah flight, but not only when we board our aliyah flight.

It comes, again and again, every time we get the chance to be together, however briefly.

It comes again, with every hug, and with every kiss, in which we must say goodbye.